varsovian
21.03.07, 10:48
Budget 2007 - Final Draft
"Mr Deputy Speaker, my parting gift as Chancellor, after a decade of cooking
the books and fiddling the numbers, is a Budget for Truth.
Let's start with growth. It has been phenomenal. I'm referring, of course, to
the growth in taxes. More than 100 new ways to extract pounds from your
pocket. Yes, your money makes my world go round.
Every year, taxpayers cough up about £500bn. Income tax, council tax, value-
added tax, corporation tax, capital gains tax, excise duties, stamp duties,
business rates and national insurance (a form of tax) pour into my coffers.
Even so, it's not enough, because I can knock it out far more quickly than
you can earn it. Last year, for instance, I had to borrow £35bn to cover my
vast over-spending. Dowdy old Prudence and I split up years ago.
The best way to burn resources on such a scale is to squander enormous sums
on unreformed public services. This we have done magnificently. Fortunes
wiped out in pursuit of a state-funded utopia to rival that of North Korea.
Nearly £100bn a year spent on health - about £1,600 for every man, woman and
child - yet we're still sacking nurses and closing hospitals. A triumph.
About £75bn a year on education but, in order to get many non-public school
kids into decent universities, we need to lower the bar to floor level.
So I'm particularly grateful to the bright spark who came up with the idea of
asking students to tell us if both their parents went to university. By
discriminating against these, we can pretend that state schools are working.
In business, it's also up, up, up. Taxes up. Red-tape up. Corporate collapses
up. Our unprecedented barrage of rules and regulations has destroyed morale
amongst entrepreneurs. They've simply lost the will to live.
And comrades, the victory parade doesn't stop there.
My booming economy has been underpinned by levels of personal debt undreamt
of even by the most avaricious pawnbroker. While the tills keep ringing, more
than 100,000 over-borrowed punters went bust last year. As the mortgage rate
creeps ever higher, so does unemployment and the number of house
repossessions.
A few more years of this and Labour's dream of equality will be a reality.
All of us will be the same - penniless dossers.
Nor do we discriminate between young and old. It's not just the youth who are
staring into the abyss. Old people, too, are terrified about the future. Why?
Because my tax grab has completely wrecked Britain's private pensions.
I call it the Swiss Cheese System: the funds are full of holes. Brilliant. We
can't have pensioners enjoying financial independence. That will never do. So
I've introduced widespread means testing, ie, they must crawl to me for help.
And finally, there's the £150bn a year I spend on "social protection",
including incapacity benefits to 2.7m claimants, even though we recognise
that about 1m of them are fit for work and should be looking for jobs. This,
Mr Deputy Speaker, is my plan to turn the country into a welfare-dependent,
socially engineered, enterprise-free zone of illiterate bankrupts, and I
commend it to the House."
